Security Leftovers
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Project Zero: Exploiting CVE-2022-42703 - Bringing back the stack attack
This blog post details an exploit for CVE-2022-42703 (P0 issue 2351 - Fixed 5 September 2022), a bug Jann Horn found in the Linux kernel's memory management (MM) subsystem that leads to a use-after-free on struct anon_vma. As the bug is very complex (I certainly struggle to understand it!), a future blog post will describe the bug in full. For the time being, the issue tracker entry, this LWN article explaining what an anon_vma is and the commit that introduced the bug are great resources in order to gain additional context.
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Fedora 35 reaches EOL on 2022-12-13 | Qubes OS
The Fedora Project has announced that Fedora 35 will reach EOL (end-of-life) on 2022-12-13. We strongly recommend that all users upgrade their Fedora templates and standalones to Fedora 36 no later than 2022-12-13.
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Reproducible Builds in November 2022 - reproducible-builds.org
Welcome to yet another report from the Reproducible Builds project, this time for November 2022. In all of these reports (which we have been publishing regularly since May 2015) we attempt to outline the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As always, if you interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
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Wladimir Palant: Common pitfalls of breaking up HTTPS connections
Let me say it up front: breaking up end-to-end-encrypted HTTPS connections is bad. No matter why you think that you need to inspect and/or modify the contents of an HTTPS connection, please consider not doing it. And if you still think that you absolutely need it, please sit down and consider again just not doing it.
Unfortunately, I know that way too often this advice won’t be followed. And I don’t mean tools like the Burp Suite which only break up end-to-end-encryption of HTTPS connections temporarily to aid developers or security researchers. No, it’s rather the antivirus applications which do it because they want to scan all your traffic for potential threats. Or companies which do it because they want to see everything happening on their network.
Usually this results in privacy and/or security issues of varying severity. A while ago I already discussed the shortcomings of Kaspersky’s approach. I later found a catastrophic issue with Bitdefender’s approach. And altogether I’ve seen a fair share of typical issues in this area which are really hard to avoid. Let me explain.